Designer Ron Arad discusses his 3D-printed sunglasses

"pq is a new brand that we started from the ground up," Arad says. It is called pq because when you write p and q it is like you are drawing glasses, explains Arad. "And they are palindromic."

Arad has been worked with 3D printing since 1999, he is also one of the first designers who use 3D printing to produce vases, lights and jewellery.

The glass frames are printed in one piece from polyamide using selective laser sintering (SLS) technology and available in various colours.

I wouldn't even bother to tell you "this is printed", says Arad. "Who cares? What we care about is does it work well? Does it give you freedom to do things you can't in other techniques? Not the fact that it's printed."

Arad discusses in the video below his experiments with 3D printing in 1999 and what he thinks of 3D printing today.

"There was a lot of excitement in the technology," says Arad. "It was obvious that it would be embraced by lots of people, and then that technology would be less exciting. You could do more exciting things but the technology itself would be, and should be, taken for granted."

Arad compares the 3D printed eyewear with his another line A-Frame glasses: "If you ask my studio to send you a movie of how the A-Frame glasses are made you'll see there's so much manual work around it and so much fiddling. I don't want to take the jobs from these people, but 3D printing is a different way of doing something."